I'm currently going through papers and boxes to prepare them for a move in the next weeks and I just found a paper with general information about the new VMware vSphere 4.1. As this is still the newest VMware vSphere version, the info is still correct. Please note that these are my personal notes on a VMware public demonstration/presentation so it is by far nothing official and does not contain all the information.

VMware vSphere 4.1 - New Features

- 3000 VM's per cluster as new maximum- 1000 physical ESX/i hosts per VirtualCenter- Up to 15'000 registered VM's- Improved ActiveDirectory authentication in ESXi- Storage I/O control (decide which VM's should be VIP's)- Network I/O control (to assure Network speed for a VM, like QoS)- vMotion is up to 5x faster than in vSphere 4.0- vMotion allows 8 parallel migrations between 2 hosts- Optimization of memory - 1000x faster than swap-in- DRS Site Clustering: Decide which VM's should run in which data center-- (note: Never more than 8 hosts in a two-site-cluster!!!!)- ISCSI performance improvements- VMware recommends the installation of vCenter Server 4.1 in a virtual (!) Windows 64bit machine

VMware vSphere 4.1 - Licensing

- vSphere license per physical CPU- vSphere Hypervisor is the new name of ESXi (the goal is to remove the thought, that ESXi is "free", in future ESXi will also be licensed)- vMotion is now already available in vSphere Standard- In vSphere Standard license the max cores per CPU are limited to 6